Matt Childs wins Gold at Hampton Court

Congratulations are in order, further to the previous post about Matt's first show garden at the RHS Hampton Flower Show.

I went along to see his garden and catch up with the delighted designer on Tuesday.

See his full story here on Jacksons Latest News:


Here are a couple of pics of the Light at the E=end of the tunnel, there are more on the news story.

Light at the end of the tunnel...

One of our Show Gardens first year winners, Matthew Childs, has come far in the short two years since having his first show garden here. The Centered Garden was displayed at Jacksons for two years and was replaced by one of the new gardens this year. this link will take you to the gallery of Matt's Centred Garden when he was interviewed by Joe Swift when he opened the 2011 Jacksons show Gardens.

Since the gardens were openened in 2010, Matt has continued to visit Jacksons on Open days and we are delighted that this year he has his first show garden at Hampton Court Flower Show and that we have been able to support him with timber for use in in "Light at the End of the Tunnel" garden.

Good luck with the garden, fingers crossed for a nice shiny medal for you Matt.
Pic below of Matt seated far left, with (left to right) Mark Smith, Mary Ann Le May, Helen Elks Smith, Joe Swift and Louise Tomlin (seat right Justine Jobson).

Show gardens in June...

The official opening for the show gardens was the 19th May. Since then we've all had time to catch up with all the jobs that went a bit by the way whilst the gardens build was going full tilt.

Over the last few weeks we have had little sun and downpour after downpour, so all the plants and trees in the gardens have had a chance to flourish - so even the new gardens planting is looking pretty mature and full in the main. The rain has been a blessing really, as last year and the year before I can remember anxiously scurrying around with the hose pipe trying to ensure that the newly planted gardens didn't suffer from drying out before the plants got established. The last thing you want when you've bought wonderful plants is to see them going crispy! No chance of this here at the moment.

As the gardens have settled and bloomed I've taken quite a lot of pics, there are a couple to see here and you can view the rest by clicking though to the show gardens web site pages
and clicking the links top left to the 2012 Show Gardens Image Gallery, I hope you enjoy them.

Garden Progress...

It has been the wettest April since records began, so not the sort of weather we have had the last two years when building the show gardens at Jacksons, In previous years we’ve been slapping on the sunscreen, instead we’ve been waddling in wet weather gear and wellies!, Not at all helpful when building and digging to a schedule. However progress has been made and the two new gardens are looking fantastic. Alison’s Natural Reflections is all but there and Kari’s Within the Weave is romping up behind, so as long we don’t have any disasters in this last week leading up to the opening we should (fingers crossed) be finished in time. Hope those aren’t famous last words! The gardens will open to public on Saturday 19th May and from then on they will be open during Jacksons usual opening hours. The five gardens from previous years are all having face lifts, with new planting, paving cleaned up and fresh coats of paint, so everything should be looking tip top by the end of the week. I took some pics, on a rare day when the sun actually shone, of both the gardens in the early stages of their development. They’ve moved on a lot since these were taken, but I’m not going to show you those as we need to keep some mystery…

And the winners are....

Everyone that has entered this year's Jacksons Show gardens competition should have had an email from me by now, giving feedback on their design and thanking them for their entry.

I really would like to say a very big thank you to everyone again, the standard of the designs this year was outstanding, and it really made it very difficult for us to pick the two winners.

But we did, and I'm sorry for those of you that got a little impatient waiting to hear, but I really did want to let everyone know individually.

Anyway, enough waffle!

This year's winners are Alison Coxhead with her lovely "Natural Reflections" garden and Kari Beardsell - Blue Bridge Garden Design and her wonderful "Within the Weave" garden.

Well done both of you.

I'm looking forward to getting the build organised and putting images of the winning design and some of the other interesting ones we got up on line throughout the week.

Jacksons Show gardens competition news

I’m happy to say we’ve managed after a lot of mulling over, lip chewing and difficult deliberating, to choose the two winning designs for this year’s show gardens.

Although I won’t be making an announcement on who the winners are just yet – last year I emailed everyone individually to let them know what was happening and give them feedback on their design. This does take quite a lot of time, as there are a lot of you, but I think it’s a much nicer way of doing this than just saying so and so has won!

So please bear with me as I start that process and hopefully by Monday I will be making the announcement, via twitter, the show gardens blog and on the web site.

Deadline for Jacksons show gardens competition

It was deadline day for the third annual Jacksons show gardens design competition yesterday the 20^th March. So the last week has seen a flurry of communications from garden designers calling and emailing me with last minute queries and some panics! We now have a large and exciting looking pile of designs to look through throughout the next few days and hope to make an announcement by the end of the week – or early next week if it gets tricky! 

Thanks very much to everyone who has entered and put all that effort and worry into coming up with their designs. Louise

The New Jacksons Fencing Show Garden Blog

Welcome to the new Jacksons Show Gardens blog.  Over the coming weeks as we approach the deadline for the Show Gardens design competition we will be posting news and information on how things are proceeding.

News of the competition winners will be posted here and on the Jacksons Fencing website